7 essential skills to make the perfect sauce

Do you want to learn how to make sauces as if you have worked in a chic Parisian restaurant all your life? Maybe you haven’t thought about it at all, but are worried that your dishes are too bland? Are you convinced that the fish is not flavorful enough? Or are you just tired of cooking the same thing every week, but don’t know how to get out of your comfort zone? If you answered yes to at least one of these questions, then you should make sauces more often.

You will not be at a loss if, in addition to the dish, prepare a suitable sauce, and fish dishes do not appear on my table without sauces at all. But for an unprepared person, the phrase “make sauce” sounds scary: where to start, what to do, where to run? .. It’s another matter if he is a prepared person, a skilled person – after all, sauces are the same section of cooking as everyone else, and having mastered a few basic skills, you will no longer wonder which side to approach the gravy boat. I have selected a few useful skills that will come in handy to one degree or another when making sauces, and there are seven of them.

Boiling broths

Most classic sauces are based on broth, usually chicken, as it has a rich, but fairly neutral flavor that is suitable for any meat and even for many fish dishes. In home cooking, when we are going to stew meat, we sometimes fill it with water, but from the point of view of culinary science this is fundamentally wrong: adding water, we thereby dilute the taste of the meat, and the finished dish turns out to be far from being as tasty as it could be. What’s the conclusion? Let’s learn how to cook broth! Of course, it is impossible to cover such an extensive topic in a nutshell, so at the end of this section I provide a link to my guide to the world of broths, but I will nevertheless highlight some key points:

• Take a little more water than the amount of broth you want, as it will boil over.
• If, when cutting raw or even baked meat, you still have bones, make it a rule not to throw them away, but put them in the freezer, and cook the broth when enough bones have accumulated. The same applies to vegetables – onion peels, carrot peels, “tired” tomatoes, stems of greens can go to the trash can, or they can wait in the wings in the freezer.
• Feel free to experiment with herbs – traditionally parsley, bay leaf and thyme work well in the broth, but dill can be added for fish dishes, and cilantro for Asian dishes.
• Chop the vegetables, and ideally chop the bones, so the ingredients will give the broth more flavor.
• Boil the broth over low heat – this will make it easier for you to remove the foam, and in this case there will not be much of it.
• To remove the fat, put the broth in the refrigerator (or, if it happens in winter, on the balcony), so all the fat will collect on top and freeze.
• Leftover broth is also conveniently stored in the freezer, and if you don’t have much free space, boil the broth several times and dilute with water when needed.

Slicing onions

Onions are one of the most popular vegetables used to flavor dishes, no matter what kind of cuisine we are talking about. In sauces, onions are also often indispensable – sometimes the preparation of the sauce begins with frying the onions, and for this, you first need to chop it finely. A food processor or blender is not an option, they will squeeze almost all the juice out of the onion, and we need the onion to put it in the sauce, voluntarily and gradually. Fortunately, the science of proper onion slicing is not a Newton binomial.

• Cut the onion lengthwise, remove the husk (if the top layer begins to darken or dry out, remove it mercilessly too), cut off the “tail”, but not the root itself, which holds all the layers together.
• Place the onion on the board with the cut down and with a sharp knife make several cuts parallel to the board, approximately 0,3 cm apart. The cuts should go from the side where the ponytail was and not go all the way so that the layers will still stick together.
• Now make vertical cuts at the same distance from each other, also without completely cutting the onion.
• After that, start cutting the onion, gradually moving towards the root, and the onion will be cut into almost perfect cubes.

Deglazing

When you fry meat, fish, or vegetables, there will inevitably be little pieces of adhesion in the bottom of the pan (unless it’s an expensive pan with an ultra-modern coating) that concentrates the flavor of the main product. You can extract this taste in a simple but elegant way: pour a little liquid (usually broth or wine) into a hot pan and wait until it boils, scrape the bottom of the pan with a spatula. This technique is called deglazing the pan. You understand the essence, but now in a little more detail and point by point:

• Fry the meat or fish you are cooking in a skillet. After removing meat or fish from the pan, cook them in the oven or put them in a warm place.
• In the remaining fat in the pan (you can add a little oil if necessary), fry the finely chopped onion and garlic.
• Pour in broth, juice, wine, or other flavorful liquid, and scrub the pan with a spatula, scrubbing off any burnt pieces from the bottom.
• Stir the contents of the pan and let it simmer so that all the ingredients will saturate the future sauce with their own taste.

Making flour dressing

There are quite a few ways to thicken a sauce, but the most popular of them is making a flour dressing, which in French cuisine is called the capacious word “ru”. Further, you can add liquid to this dressing (for example, milk for béchamel sauce or broth for numerous sauces for meat dishes), or, on the contrary, add dressing to sauce or soup to thicken them. The process of making flour dressing is simple, but it has its own nuances, so again, point by point:

• Take butter and flour in a 1: 1 weight ratio. Melt the butter over medium heat, then add the flour and fry, stirring vigorously, to form a smooth, thick paste at the bottom of the gravy boat.
• Fry the flour dressing, stirring constantly, until the desired color, but at least 2-3 minutes, to remove the flour aftertaste. Keep in mind that the darker the dressing turns out, the weaker its thickening properties, and therefore, the less liquid is needed for the desired consistency.
• Add a small portion of the liquid to the flour dressing, stirring vigorously with a whisk to avoid clumping. Having achieved uniformity, pour in the rest of the liquid, still stirring your future sauce, and boil it for about 20 more minutes in order to finally eliminate the flour taste.
• Chopped herbs, vegetables, spices and other ingredients can be added to the sauce to enrich its flavor.
• The thickness of the resulting sauce depends on the ratio of dressing and liquid. On average, 100 grams of flour dressing per 1 liter of liquid is enough for a medium-thick sauce, and if the sauce is too thin, it can be boiled down to the desired consistency.

Alcohol use

A good chef knows that beer, wine or spirits can be not only an accompaniment to a dish, but also an ingredient in it. In beer and wine, meat is often stewed or used as a basis for sauces, which are served separately, and strong alcohol is either added in small doses for flavor, or flambéed with it, the ingredients of the sauce or the dish itself. A few rules to keep in mind if you are using alcohol to make a sauce:

• The general rule for all such dishes is that trying to save money, you do not need to buy wine for the sauce that you would not drink. Trust me, its taste won’t go anywhere. But the use of “exhausted” wine in the sauce, which was opened a few days ago, is a very sensible and correct idea.
• After marinating meat (such as kebabs or roast beef) in wine, strain the marinade and use it to make the wine sauce.
• Alcohol-added sauce is boiled for a while, and most of the alcohol evaporates. At the same time, keep in mind that some scanty part of alcohol will in any case remain in the ready dish.
• Any such sauce will benefit greatly if you enrich it with the spices and root vegetables that you usually use to boil broth.
• Flambing is a spectacular technique that allows you to get both visual special effects and interesting nuances of taste, but you should resort to it with all precautions so as not to start a fire.

emulsion Preparation

Many of the classic sauces, from the banal mayonnaise to the less common Hollandese and Behr blanc sauces, are emulsions. An emulsion is a stable mixture of two immiscible liquids, that is, in the culinary sense, fat and water. The first is usually butter, butter or vegetable, the second is a huge number of different ingredients from eggs to boiled wine or lemon juice. What you need to know if you are going to make an emulsion (for example, make mayonnaise) for the first time:

• To prepare the emulsion, fat is added to the liquid components, and not vice versa. If you are preparing mayonnaise, first gently pour in the oil in a thin stream, and only then, when your future sauce begins to thicken, you can add more fat.
• If the mayonnaise has stratified during the cooking process, beat another yolk and add the failed sauce to it in the same way as you would add butter.
• The emulsion is a stable but not immortal mixture. The sauce can stratify during storage (in this case, you can simply stir it) or if it is overheated. Accordingly, nothing can be “baked under mayonnaise”.
• Hot sauce, which is thickened in a pan with the addition of butter, is also a kind of emulsion. To prepare it, cut the very cold butter into small cubes and add a few cubes at a time to the pan, stirring vigorously with a whisk. The butter will slowly melt, mixing with the base of the sauce, and thicken it. To do this, the pan must be on fire, but its contents must not boil for the reason described above.

boiling

In order for the taste of the sauce to become more saturated, it is boiled down, that is, it is left at a slight boil until some of the liquid has boiled away, and the one that remains reaches the desired taste and consistency. During the boil, the water is the first to evaporate, and all the flavors remain in the sauce, making its flavor more concentrated. In addition, in some cases – for example, when it comes to cream or mashed tomatoes – the sauce thickens due to the fact that it initially contained a sufficient proportion of solids. What do you need to keep in mind?

• Avoid the temptation to boil the sauce over high heat – this will save time, but negatively affect the taste of the sauce and its consistency.
• Remove the lid, this will remove the obstruction from the steam escape and speed up the boiling process.
• When boiling a thick sauce, do not forget to stir it periodically so that it warms up evenly and does not stick to the bottom of the gravy boat. To prevent splashes of this sauce from staining the kitchen, cover the gravy boat with an inverted sieve.
• Salt the already boiled sauce, otherwise there is a risk that it will turn out oversalted.
• The sauce that thickens with the flour dressing is boiled after combining the dressing and the liquid, and the one that is thickened with the addition of butter – before.